


i've built a home inside his eyes

by smallredboy



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Bisexual Greg House, Bisexual James Wilson, Butch/Femme, Canon compliant-ish, Flirting, Gay Bar, Leather Culture, M/M, Motorcycles, Other: See Story Notes, Time Skips, not very historically accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29203980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallredboy/pseuds/smallredboy
Summary: House and Wilson explore the butch and femme dynamic before they meet each other, and the pieces fall right in place when they do.
Relationships: Greg House/James Wilson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32





	i've built a home inside his eyes

**Author's Note:**

> please read [this document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/164Ujh6L_G_EdImKBRp32S51WqOYrMAlWgSAucvVQEHY/edit?usp=sharing) before you talk to me about butch and femme being lesbian exclusive terms. they're not. please. stop it.
> 
> i run off spite and also off thinking about how b/f hilson is so. here's this little thing.
> 
> title's from _driving down to l.a._ by ezra furman.
> 
> _enjoy!_

When House first started to realize he was bisexual, it was the late seventies and he was in undergrad.

It didn't take him long to flock to the gay bars nearby as soon as he turned twenty-one, a small number of them peppered across the city. He wanted some sort of guidance, some sort of guide to how to deal with his attraction to men. Inside the bars he found interesting dichotomies between masculine and feminine gay people, the butch and femme of women and the butch and queen of men. Some men were using the term femme, as well, taking it in stride, with painted fingernails and that limp-wristed disposition that attracted him like a moth to a flame.

There he met Alexis, a man in his thirties with a thick accent that he had a hard time locating. He was butch, and involved in the gay leather subculture—he was a beautiful man, soft features and yet a strong build, with some of the widest shoulders House had ever seen. His play at masculinity was so exaggerated that even the most clueless of straight men knew he wasn't one of them. 

"If you know how to ride a bike, then this won't be hard work for you," Alexis told him as he settled on his own motorbike. 

House didn't want to tell him that he had never learned how to ride a bike. His father had tried, by God had he tried, but his balance issues made it impossible for him to go much longer than a few feet without toppling into the ground. 

"If you don't know how to ride a bike, that's okay too, boy," he snarled gently when he saw him stammer and flush pink. "I'll teach you."

It was his butch mentors that he took most of his disposition from. He borrowed the leather jackets and the rough exterior, the motorbike riding and the appreciation for femmes. While he was very bad at relationships, he had short lived relationships with femme men and femme women alike, with a few butch women in between. He had the desire to protect femmes, the burning need to take care of them and make them smile. But he was a bit of an asshole too, and most people were driven away from him because of that.

He dated a wonderful straight woman for a while, Stacy. She accepted his sexuality and she loved him nonetheless, even as he rambled on about butchness and gay bars and the subcultures in between them. She didn't _understand_ , she didn't _get it_ , but what she did was support him, which was just as important, if not more. But then he had an infarction, and everything had gone to shit then.

But before that, before everything went wrong, he met a man by the name James Wilson. And he was the most beautiful femme he had ever laid eyes on.

* * *

Wilson realized he was bisexual before he married his first wife. Two weeks before their wedding, in fact.

It had been the startling realization that not every man feels how he did. A man in a leather jacket and leather pants was drunk and headed toward his booth at the bar, a fruity cocktail in his hand and whiskey in Sam's. He hit on him quite aggressively, and all he could think about was that he would, in fact, be interested if he wasn't in a relationship. He'd stammered out something about being straight, that he was engaged and that he should leave. But Sam could see it in his eyes, those nerves. 

"You're most definitely not straight," she said. "I'd like to think you're attracted to me, but..."

"I am," he replied urgently. "I am. I'm in love with you, Sam. I've always just... I don't know. I never wanted to discuss it or think about it for too long, but I..." He sighed, rubbed his temples. "I don't know. I'm sorry."

"Hey," she said. "I love you." She pulled him into a quick kiss. "No matter what. Okay? It's alright. Don't worry about it."

He huffed, smiled at her. "I'll try not to."

As much as she supported him in the discovery of his sexuality, their marriage still crumbled to pieces. He wasn't good at relationships, a fact he quickly learned—he got bored when people didn't _need_ him anymore, when they were now in a good state of mind, when they could go on all on their own. And so as they started to take care of getting divorced, he started going to gay bars.

He liked to imagine himself as someone who could pass for straight, or who at least wasn't too limp-wristed. But as soon as he got there he got raised up as a _queen_ , as they called feminine men. Some feminine men called themselves femmes, off the cuff, the same way lesbians and bisexual women who were feminine called themselves, although the terms were losing popularity as bar culture for them started to slip away from their grasp.

"Why did you immediately think I was femme? I'm not donned up in drag or anything," he asked one of his femme mentors, a man by the name of Vince. He had his hair down to his shoulders and he was constantly reapplying his lipstick—he had some of the sharpest wits he had ever seen in his life.

"You just _look_ it, darling," he replied, lips curling into an easy smile as he fiddled with his lipstick tube. "With your hands in your hips and that angle to your wrist, ah, how could we possibly raise you up as a butch?"

He suddenly realized that he did, in fact, constantly have his hands in his hips. He hummed at that, playing with it in his mind.

He grew more comfortable with his identity that way. He still hid himself in public, when it felt like he could get called anything (especially as the years rolled on and that _disease_ started wracking havoc in his community), but at the bars he let himself be free. He let his femme friends apply lipstick onto him, dress him up, and he let the butches around the bar hit on him easily, smile at him and offer him a ride in their motorbike.

He didn't do anything with anyone, though. His relationship with Sam had soured, sure, but they still were married, and he didn't want to betray her in that way. He told her about the culture he had come in contact with between sips of beer and she listened carefully, took in every detail, as she said that she was starting to figure she wasn't all that straight, after all.

"Guess we're both femmes then," Wilson had said lightly, leaning into her.

She smiled. "Yeah. Guess so."

* * *

House knew on sight that the man who threw a bottle at an antique mirror was a femme. And he was one of the most beautiful femmes he had ever seen—the way of his eyes, mocha brown, his unceremonious yet beautiful locks of hair, the way he put his hand on his hip as he fiddled with the papers on his lap. He had watched him for a while, in the middle of this horrid medical conference, looking for any sort of intelligent, gay life among the painfully straight hundreds of people. There were a few, sure, that he could pick out, but they all seemed awfully boring.

But Wilson, oh dear God, Wilson. Something about him pulled him like a moth to a flame—maybe it was the way he held himself up, maybe it was the way he called out the man playing _Leave a Tender Moment Alone_ in the speakers of the afterparty. Maybe it was the way he grabbed the whiskey bottle he was drinking out of and chucked it into the man's general vicinity, breaking an antique mirror in the process. It was that ferocity in his femme form that drew him in, and as the cops stormed into the place and took him to spend the night in prison, he knew he had to do something about it.

He donned his finest leather jacket and put on leather pants to go with it, although he usually wasn't too keen on the pants—they itched a bit too much, his sensory issues complaining. But he had to make sure that Wilson could see him for what he was: one of his own kind. The morning after the afterparty he headed to the county jail and posted bail for James Evan Wilson.

Wilson stared at him for a long time, as if he had grown a second head: he stared and took him in, his factions, the way he settled himself as he stood. The leather. "I didn't expect for a handsome butch to come bail me out."

His lips curled into an easy smile. "Well, that's what I'm here for," he said. "Saw you do all that, decided you were beautiful and wanted to get you out."

"And take me out, I presume," he drawled out, batting his lashes in that way femmes know how to do best. 

Heat and butterflies alike pool in House's belly and he smiled at him. "Of course. We can just leave the state and try to avoid the police, if you'd be into that."

Wilson laughed. "Oh, I'm game," he said. "What's your name?"

"Gregory House," he replied. "I graduated from med school a few years back."

"Oh, I graduated just now," he says. "I'm James Wilson, as you know. What'd you specialize in?"

"Nephrology and infectious disease." He led Wilson over to his motorbike and settled in front to control it. There was nothing more butch and femme than that, leather and biker men going hand in hand, often being one and the same entity. He certainly enjoyed both cultures, and he loved the feeling of a femme's hands wrapped around his waist as he drove, the noise roaring in his ears. He turned to look at Wilson and patted the place that was left for him to settle in. "You?"

"Oncology," he answered before settling there, right behind House, his torso splayed out against House's back. It was intimate, and he soon enough did the last bit of wrapping his hands around House's middle. "I've never rode a motorbike before."

"Never? Surely other men must be treating you better than me."

"I mean," he started, and laughed softly. "I've been invited to plenty of times, but I was kind of _married_ and didn't want anything to escalate."

"Oh, I see," he said. The divorce part immediately peaked his interest, but he knew that prodding was usually considered rude, something learned from multiple times asking questions about private matters that made his classmates quite disgruntled with him. And while he thought that being rude wasn't that big of a deal, he didn't want Wilson to be mad at him. He thought of the papers he saw Wilson fiddling with, and assumed that they were the legal nonsense for his divorce. "I hope that went okay."

He turned on the ignition and it made that horrid noise he just had to grow used to. He grit his teeth and started driving out of the place. He had a very good feeling about all this.

* * *

And now, fifteen years later, they're still a _thing_.

Wilson finished his divorce with Julie and soon afterward House got together with Stacy. There was that unspoken part about how those relationships wouldn't work. Their friendship was too strong, and they _were_ the dynamic that they always searched for, butch man and a femme man. But they had fallen for other people, and for the time being had taken care of it.

But then House got his infarction and everything went down south for the two of them and their relationships. His relationship with Stacy soured after the surgery she agreed to that he didn't want, that horrid middle ground—and Wilson's relationship with his new wife soured after he started spending so much time with House.

After that happened, it was only logical for them to get together. They haven't regretted it since.

One of House's favorite parts of their life is still going to the bars. The population of them changes as people get older. Last he heard of Alexis, he was nearing his eighties and was on antiretroviral medication. Last Wilson heard of his femme mentor by the name of Vince, he was hitting seventy and was happily committed to a wonderful biker.

The best part about the bars now is the people still trying to learn about the dynamic, trying to be mentored when there's no guidebook to being butch or femme. Most of them are younger, barely legally allowed to be in here: young trans people and young lesbians, mainly, with the spare young gay man who heard about butch also being used in the gay man community. _I thought it was just for lesbians_ , some of them always say, wide-eyed. _But it feels like coming home. Like the label's just right for me._

"If the label's right for you then it's right for you," House replies gruffly as he sips his beer, Wilson next to him, of course drinking a fruity little cocktail he desperately wants to make fun of. He turns to him and scoffs teasingly. "Way to show the entire bar you're a femme, James."

"If they don't know already they know now," he replies, showing off the cocktail glass. 

His protégé of choice is a young Latino transmasculine person. He seems to be a few months on T, patchy beard and cut short hair, but he does walk and talk like every fully realized butch: the confidence dripping off him in waves, the straight posture, the leather jacket a size too big for him.

He's not one for mentorships, but he feels the need to protect these young people, show them the ropes when he can. 

"Is that your husband?" the kid asks.

He tries not to blush at that. "Yes," he replies all too quietly. "He's my husband."

Wilson gets embarrassed too, looks down at his nails, painted bright pink just for the night. He tries to be femme when out and about, with his hands in his hips and whatnot, but he likes being on the safer side of things until he's at the bar. "We aren't legally married, of course, but we do plan to get married when the law passes. Whenever that may be."

"Could I come?" the kid asks, smiling at them all so bright, and House's heart softens, as it often does when he comes to the bar and sees the next generation sitting there, talking, flirting, asking for advice.

House looks at Wilson, and Wilson looks right back at him, telling him silently to answer the question, to let his cold hardened heart grow soft once again.

It's hard to be soft. It's hard to be soft in such a hard world, for butches and for disabled people and for bisexuals and for everyone else like him or along the same lines as him. He's trying to soften up, Wilson's encouraging mumbles when he manages to apologize to someone for something he said. It feels like swallowing glass, but he's starting to learn how to not let it cut up his throat.

He turns back to look at the kid, his floppy hair and oversized leather jacket. "Of course you can come," he replies, cracking a small smile and leaning into his cane. "I'll be inviting this whole damn bar at this point, honestly."

Wilson gives him a grin, all proud, and he leans over for a kiss, tasting his chapstick as he melts against him.


End file.
